Most companies present on the market will agree they are dedicating more time to social media. Some of the smaller ones will probably perform all the actions required themselves, spending 2+ hours a day just to post across different channels where their potential audience is gathering. Others, a bit bigger, hire one or more social media coordinators whose job is making strategies to approach potential customers.
In both cases, companies will most likely have at least one social media account. The reason for this is that being active online will greatly boost their chances of success. Basically, being present on social media where most of the younger generations are gathering, and older ones are starting to as well, is going to advance any business faster.
Think about it from a customer’s perspective. Looking at a business’ web page and finding an interesting product will most likely lead you to check out their Instagram or Facebook profile. Once there, you expect to see more photos, more reviews, and even the possibility of having one-on-one contact through which the company can assuage any potential doubts you might have. These are just some of the reasons why companies invest in accounts on such platforms.
On the other side, social media for companies (if they want to make money out of it) isn’t just posting a photo from time to time without a plan. Managing different social media accounts represents a big challenge and a big commitment. Developing social media calendars, strategies to approach customers, creating graphics, posting across channels, answering customers’ inquiries, and analyzing after you have reached a certain audience is definitely what the whole process should look like and why it’s so time-consuming.
All marketers/social media coordinators dream of a tool that would combine data from multiple social platforms and manage, post, and analyze their social activity. For this reason, we have shortly described and highlighted the top 5 social media platforms/applications that will allow you to do just that.
Check them out below.
1. CloudSocial
Social media management tools like CloudSocial is all your marketing and social team will ever need. Targeting your customers and scheduling posts has never been easier since they automatically appear in your social media calendar, which is one click away from your dashboard.
Using CloudSocial, you can establish a sense of trust with your audience since it allows you to listen to them and respond to comments, emails, and inquiries immediately from the platform. This feature is called Omnibox and is your go-to-inbox, especially when it comes to engagement and communication with your customers. Post to various channels such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube, all while making sure your posts are visible to larger crowds.
After the deed is done, CloudSocial analytics will analyze the campaign’s success and the audience.
It’s not only communication with your audience that’s important; communicating with your team is a must if you plan on leading a strong team. This is just another great feature of CloudSocial. It makes collaboration easier than ever. You can now communicate with your whole marketing team, assign roles, tag them on a specific task, and add an importance tag to each of the inquiries you will receive.
As a cherry on top, this tool gathers all the information customers are posting about you to observe the way they see you as well as show what you can improve upon using sentiment analytics.
2. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is another social media helper that allows you to connect your Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Google+ profile to the platform. This collaborative platform helps you with: engaging with your audience, publishing and analyzing data, and listening to your post-performance.
A special feature called Single Stream Inbox tracks the messages you get from the customers. Along with just tracking, it comes with posting features that will steer you in the right direction when deciding how to time each post and maximize engagement in doing so.
The platform doesn’t only track your posts and customer engagement; it also monitors your team’s performance and who stands out as the most responsive.
3. Agorapulse
Third on our list is Agorapulse, a platform that helps you in your everyday marketing activities. Its best feature is an inbox assistant that gathers all your saved replies and allows you to use them with the aim of answering your customers quicker.
If you’re worried about having too many socials to manage, that fear can disappear. Agorapulse has integration with Facebook (Facebook groups as well), Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn. The best part about it is that this platform allows you to share social media calendars and analytics with interested parties (e.g., superiors, other marketing members, or companies that recruited you).
Basically, you can save a lot of time with it.
4. Hootsuite
Like the above-mentioned platforms, Hootsuite allows you to connect your Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter accounts but also presents the possibility of adding a Pinterest account to their dashboard.
Apart from that, integration with other platforms that your team already uses, such as Salesforce, Trello, Slack, and Chute, is made easy with Hootsuite. In case you need more great features to convince you, this platform also lets you publish, engage, schedule, advertise, monitor, and analyze your posts with ease. Doing this lowers your response time, increases engagement, and posts relevant posts to a targeted audience.
And to end on a unique note, Hootsuite also has a review feature, so your superiors can approve the posts easily and in minutes. No more delays in posting, not now, not ever.
5. eClincher
Last but not least in our top-ranked social media management platforms is eClincher that supports integration with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google My Business, and YouTube. This platform will not only allow scheduling, posting, analyzing, and engaging with your posts. It will also allow you to categorize them into campaigns and give an option to analyze them separately.
Make sure to enable the drag-and-drop feature on Instagram posts when you want to re-arrange your feed, as it makes the job so much easier. Speaking of things getting easy, eClincher also comes with the ability to store your media for future posts in the media library.
Just like any other business, you never want your social media engagement to stop while you’re away, and by installing the mobile app, it never has to.
As a bonus platform, you can try Task Ant. Task Ant is primarily an Instagram hashtag finder service, but has many other cool features, too.
Conclusion
We agree it might be difficult to choose the platform that will make the best addition to your marketing team as all the tools we’ve mentioned are extremely useful. Even though they all have pretty much the same basic options and features covered, based on different reviews we gathered from marketing teams, you will never go wrong with CloudSocial. The platform will unquestionably allow your team and your customers to have an exceptional social experience.